NEW DELHI: Red Hat Inc has announced a new certification, Red Hat Certified Virtualization Administrator (RHCVA), designed to equip IT professionals with cloud  computing  infrastructure deployment skills.

With the adoption of cloud computing among businesses across the Asia Pacific region, systems administrators and IT professionals are looking to gain new skillsets to prepare for this IT evolution.

The RHCVA certification provides systems administrators and IT professionals with necessary training in virtualization, which is foundational to cloud computing. The hands-on training course is designed to benefit experienced Linux, Microsoft-certified and Cisco-certified system administrators, giving them the skills to manage large numbers of servers or virtual machines using Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, a high-performance and scalable virtualization solution.

"The move to cloud computing is progressing for many enterprises and forward-looking IT professionals are taking action now to acquire these new skills to manage the new generation datacenters of tomorrow. As companies evolve to the cloud computing model, they look to hire skilled and qualified IT professionals that they can trust to carry out successful implementations," said Alan Ho, senior manager, Services Marketing, Red Hat Asia Pacific / Japan.

"Over the months, we have seen considerable interest for our virtualization courses and certifications. Given the market demands and as a leader in cloud computing, we believe it is an opportune time now to introduce this certification. Companies recognize that the open source approach to cloud computing offers them significant benefits especially in terms of interoperability."

A study conducted by Springboard Research in Asia points to an increasing use of cloud computing in the region. "Approximately 19 percent of the Asian enterprises surveyed already use cloud computing; an additional 26 percent plan to do so," said Michael Barnes, vice president of Software and Asia Pacific Research at Springboard Research.

In addition, professional recruitment consultancy Robert Walters highlighted that companies are recruiting pre-sales, solution architects and technical specialists due to the increased adoption of cloud computing and virtualization technologies.

The open source approach to cloud computing offers enhanced interoperability, by allowing businesses to build their cloud from the their existing components — whether Microsoft Windows or Red Hat Enterprise Linux; LAMP, Java, or .Net; Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, VMware ESX, or Microsoft Hyper-V; Infrastructure-as-a-Service or Platform-as-a-Service; on-premise or public clouds.

The RHCVA certification is the latest addition to the Red Hat Academy curriculum which provides rigorous performance-based training in open source Linux solutions. Industry analyst, IDC, ranked Red Hat as the leader in IT Education and Training in 2009.